Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

“Tell you what I’m going to do,” the sergeant said meditatively. “I’m going to send you to the garrison guarding Kolekole Pass, off to the west of Schofield Barracks. That’ll help me peel some trained soldiers out of there and put ’em in a part of the line where there’s more going on.”

Peterson realized he’d just been handed the Army equivalent of the coast defense of South Dakota. He started to say that he’d come up here to fight, not to make it easier for somebody else to. The words didn’t pass his lips. Privates didn’t get to make protests like that. The sergeant undoubtedly knew more about how things were going than he did. He managed a nod. “All right, Sergeant.”

“There you go,” the noncom said. “That’s almost always the right answer. Truck full of beans and stuff heading over there pretty soon. You hustle, you can scrounge a lift. And you better hope you don’t see too many Japs there. You do, we’re in deep shit. Go on, scram. I got more things to worry about besides you.”

Off Peterson went. He did catch the truck, and rode in the cab with the driver. The kid behind the wheel was named Billy Joe McKennie, and hailed from somewhere deep in the South. He said, “If’n them Japs”-it came out Jayups, the first time Peterson had ever heard it as a two-syllable word-“try comin’ over the Waianae”-a name that had to be heard to be believed-“Mountains, they’ll have to come through us’ns, an’ I don’t reckon they kin.”

“How do you know they won’t try somewhere else?” Peterson asked.

McKennie might not speak much real English, but he understood it. He looked at Peterson as if he were crazy. “On account of a goat’d have trouble gittin’ over them mountains, let alone a lousy Jap.”

The truck rumbled through Schofield Barracks. The east-west road that cut the immense base in half remained intact. The barracks, and all the other buildings around the facility, had taken a hell of a beating. Burned-out cars and trucks had been hastily dragged off the road. They sprawled alongside it, a terrible tangle of twisted metal. Peterson didn’t like to think about the men who’d been inside them when they were hit.

West of the base, the land began climbing toward the mountains. The closer Peterson got to them, the more he started to think Billy Joe McKennie had a point. They weren’t especially tall, but they rose swift and steep. And they were covered with the thickest, most impenetrable-looking jungle he’d ever seen. He couldn’t have named half the plants-hell, he couldn’t have named any of them-but he wouldn’t have wanted to try pushing through that maze of trees and ferns and thorny bushes.

Halfway through Kolekole Pass, the road stopped. The mountains loomed up on either side. The American detachment faced west. It boasted some field guns, several nicely sited machine guns, and a couple of command cars-soldiers called them peeps-with pintle-mounted machine guns of their own for mobile firepower.

Peterson helped McKennie and the soldiers already at the strongpoint unload the truck. Nobody seemed to find anything out of the ordinary about him. He pulled his weight. When McKennie drove off, a whole squad of men rode in the back of the truck.

“We give away a dozen and we get one back,” grumbled the major in charge of the garrison. By the disgusted look on his face, this wasn’t the first time that had happened. “Pretty soon we’ll have all the guns in the world and not a soul to shoot ’em.”

He stood in no serious danger of having all the guns in the world. Whether he’d run out of men was a different question. The question related to it was whether he ought to have any men there at all. The more Peterson looked at those mountains, the more he suspected the garrison was what the Army did instead of snapping its fingers to keep the elephants away.

“Sir, I don’t think Tarzan of the Apes could come at us through country like this,” he said.

The major blinked. Then he grinned. “You never can tell with Tarzan,” he said. “He got around a lot-that lost Roman city and…” He went on and on. Peterson realized he’d run into an Edgar Rice Burroughs fanatic. The major shifted to John Carter on Mars, then to Carson Napier on Venus. Peterson had to listen to him, and listen, and listen. The officer started talking about Burroughs himself, who, it turned out, spent a lot of his time on Oahu.

If Peterson was any judge, Burroughs came to a place like this to escape his fans. There probably was no escape, though. No escape for me, that’s for sure, Peterson thought unhappily. The major didn’t seem to want to run dry.

At last, he did. That let Peterson escape, and it let him look east across the center of Oahu. He could trace the front all the way over to the Koolau Range on the other side of the island. It wasn’t that far. If the Americans could hold the Japs north of Schofield Barracks and Wahiawa, he thought they had a decent chance.

Kolekole Pass would have made a hell of an observation post. Peterson started to say something about that, then hesitated. A Navy lieutenant could make such suggestions. What about a buck private in the Army? Wasn’t he supposed to keep his mouth shut and do as he was told? That was what he would have wanted from an ordinary seaman in the Navy. He buttoned his lip.

A little later, he heard the major talking into a field telephone. The officer was pinpointing the location of a Japanese artillery position. Peterson laughed at himself. Old Granny Army didn’t need him to teach her how to suck eggs.

Off in the distance, artillery boomed. Machine guns rattled. Rifles crackled like fireworks. Here in the pass, everything was quiet. Soldiers played pinochle or acey-deucey. Birds chirped. Peterson could no more name them than the trees in which they perched.

It was quiet duty. Considering what was going on only a few miles away, it was miraculously quiet. Most of the men seemed delighted to be out of anything more dangerous. Peterson muttered and fumed. He wanted to have a go at the Japs, not sit here twiddling his thumbs in a place where they were anything but likely to show up.

After fuming till the sun swung down toward the horizon, he decided to beard the major after all. The man heard him out. Then he said, “No. I’m sorry, Private. I commend your initiative. It does you credit. But the answer is still no. We are serving a necessary function here. I would sooner be in combat myself. But I am doing what was ordered of me, and you will do what is ordered of you. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” Peterson said. That the man was obviously right only made his refusal more galling.

They had beans for supper, beans and roast pork. The beans couldn’t have come off of Peterson’s truck; they’d been soaked before they were boiled. They weren’t anything fancy, but they were okay. As for the pork, everybody smiled and ate in a hurry. Peterson suspected the pigs had been liberated from some little local farm. No one said anything, though, and he didn’t think he’d make himself popular by asking a whole lot of questions.

He rolled himself in his blanket and fell asleep on the ground. Some of the soldiers had mosquito netting. He didn’t. He wondered how high a price he’d pay for that. He tossed and turned, trying to get comfortable. Snores rose around him. The Army men had no trouble sleeping on bare ground. If he’d got used to sacking out in a bunk every night, that was his hard luck.

And then, some time around midnight, shouts woke everybody who’d managed to fall asleep. “Out! Out! Out!” the major yelled. “We’ve got to get out of here before we get cut off and surrounded!”

“What the fuck?” somebody said, which perfectly summed up what Peterson was thinking.